North of Beautiful (34 page)

“More, a lot more.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You broke up with Merc,” I said. Even though we had exchanged a couple of e-mails, I never felt comfortable enough with her to ask about Merc. So now I flinched at the overt accusation in my unintended words more than she did. “I mean, it was my fault you broke up. I’m sorry.”

Immediately, Elisa glanced over her shoulder at the dressing room door, so old it must have been salvaged from an ancient courtyard house. She squeezed my shoulder apologetically. “We’ll talk in a few minutes, okay? Have a look around.” Then she grabbed another dress off a branch — silvery purple, the exact shade of Mom’s Russian sage.

Had this not been Elisa’s store, I would have been intimidated by its very poshness, its aggressive hipness. It would have been the kind of place where I felt like I had to apologize for my presence, the kind I would have left two seconds after I’d entered. Even as I inspected one dress after another — each with a slight Asian flair — I surreptitiously observed her customers, the oldest again cocking her head to the side, frowning at herself in the mirror. Geez, what did she have to be dissatisfied about? From head to toe, she looked enviably gorgeous, but her hands kept smoothing the jersey dress over her nonexistent hips. The girl, my age in showstopping orange, must have agreed with me.

“Mom,” she said decisively, “you look brilliant.”

“No, Syrah, you look brilliant,” countered her mother. “That is a yes.”

The third woman, taller than the other two, stifled a smile unsuccessfully. “All I know is Age’s eyes will pop out when he sees you next week.”

“Really?” Syrah angled herself in front of the mirror, met my eyes as if asking my opinion. I nodded, oh yeah. She grinned. “Then this is definitely a yes.”

What would it be like to look in the mirror and actually accept what you saw? Not loathe the reflection, or despise it, or be resigned to it? But to like it?

As soon as the women fluttered out of the shop, purchases in their hands, Elisa turned to me.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said, as though we were in the middle of our conversation. “It wasn’t your fault at all. God, how could you even begin to think that?” Her eyes bore into mine, challenging me to say otherwise.

“If we hadn’t talked about my collages at Christmas —,” I began.

“This had nothing to do with that. . . .” She turned away abruptly, fussed with the dresses on one of the branches, arranging them so they had precisely an inch between them. Room to breathe. And then with her back still turned to me, she said, “No, I’ll be honest. Christmas opened up issues between me and your brother that I hadn’t wanted to deal with.”

“Like what?” I asked.

She shook her head, now placing a sage green dress next to a teal one.

But I had to know. “What? Dad?”

“Not per se.”

“Then what?” I followed Elisa to the dressing room, where she picked up the rejected fuchsia dress from the tiny leather chair, slipped it back onto the hanger. “I’d never seen Merc . . . so easy . . . with any of his other girlfriends.”

“I know,” she said. “I know that.”

As unrelenting as Jacob had been when he was pursuing the truth, I knew I was being worse. And I knew how uncomfortable that had made me. But I couldn’t back off now.

“He brought you home,” I said.

She held the dress to her middle, unconsciously shielding herself. “He did, Terra. And he’s a great guy. I just can’t be with a man who doesn’t stand up for his mother.” Her free hand reached for me in forgiveness. “Or his little sister.”

I swallowed hard, this lump of bitter truth.

Her eyes darkened, curiosity tinged with challenge. “Is he here?”

I shook my head, unable to speak.

She sighed, impatient, disappointed. “One of my girlfriends is a counselor, and she says that couples get unhappy when they start expecting things of each other. But I disagree.” Elisa hung up the dress she was holding and then swapped its position with another. “I’m not talking about expecting a diamond necklace and getting a box of chocolates instead. But support and loyalty? You should be able to expect that much from your partner.”

I had never admitted to myself how I always felt like Merc had abandoned me. Never calling or e-mailing me on his ubiquitous BlackBerry to see how Mom and I were faring at home, and now dumping us in China when neither Mom nor I had ever been overseas. Or spoke the language. Or knew where we were going.

“We made it just fine,” I assured her.

“I knew you would, but that isn’t the point.”

I slipped another dress on a hanger, handed it to Elisa without a word. All along, I had attributed their breakup to a history of dates he had cancelled on her, their vacations he had postponed. To their unsatisfying time together, which had probably been long bouts of him on his BlackBerry interspersed with a few minutes of conversation. But it was more than that. The same elements missing in my relationship with Erik, and Mom’s with Dad, were the ones absent in Elisa’s with Merc: tenderness, attention, and the assurance that we had their unconditional support.

I stood before Merc’s ex-girlfriend now, watching her hang the dress back in its proper place. I expected her to dismiss me now, return to her busy day and to her business.

“I have something for you,” I told her. From my backpack, I withdrew the collage she had asked for back at Christmas.

“It’s a beautiful piece of art,” she pronounced, laying her hand on the collage, a benediction.

I don’t know why her simple statement of faith made me tear up. But it did.

“You really have so much talent. Jolie laide,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s a French term.”

I blushed, remembered how Dad had flung it at me. “I know. ‘Pretty ugly.’”

“I suppose in the strictest translation that’s what it means.” She set the collage on a chair, upholstered in a leopard print, then took a few steps away and cocked her head. Finally, she explained, “This isn’t actually beautiful; it says too many hard things for it be beautiful in the traditional sense.” She took a step closer. “And yet it draws you to it. And when I close my eyes” — she did so now — “I can still see the image, as if it has bored into me here” — she pointed to her heart — “and here” — she touched her head. And then opening her eyes, she turned to me. “That is jolie laide.”

Unexpectedly, she picked up the summer version of the dress she had worn at my home, the one I had admired, but instead of wool, it was silk jersey.

“Try this on,” she urged, holding the dress out to me.

“I can’t.”

“It’s my welcome gift to China.”

It was more than that. We both knew that. It was her goodbye gift.

“Trust me on this,” she said. “It’ll be perfect on you. Try it on.”

So I did.

“That is so you,” she said when I stepped out of the dressing room.

Like the customers before me, I gazed at my reflection, surprised that I liked what I saw. “That’s what I was thinking, too.”

In another time, I would have lingered in this neighborhood, an artists’ community I could envision myself living in, working in — despite being thousands of miles from my comfort zone. On Elisa’s block alone I counted five galleries. I hated every step I took that led me out of this pedestrians’ enclave, led me away from Elisa, who I had hoped would be the sister I never had. I hated this drifting away feeling.

But Mom was waiting at the hotel, and I didn’t have time to poke around. Still, I couldn’t help but slow down and then stop altogether in front of the last gallery on the street. With its sleek white shelves and chrome fixtures, edited of every frivolous angle, the showroom was the antithesis of my homey Nest & Egg Gallery. Displayed in the front window on a plinth was a sculptural ball, wound with long strips of tie-dyed bandages. On one side of it was a marble, a miniaturized green and blue Earth seen from above. On the other side, its identical twin, smashed, like the glass globe Claudius had crushed in his hands. One large shard of glass lay on top of granules, fine as sand.

If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole?

You’d have to remove the layers. You’d have to risk breaking the ball for a chance at freeing it. Fear, knowledge, certainty — you’d have to be willing to let them all go.

Chapter twenty-eight

Pathfinder

AS MUCH AS I ACHED to see Jacob again, wanted to know what he thought of his orphanage, leaving Beijing upset me more than I thought it would. Neither Mom nor I minded when a woman jostled us with her overstuffed luggage as we waited in yet another line to check in for our flight to Hangzhou. Which I took to mean that we had acclimatized to crowds pressing in on us all the time. For all Beijing’s pollution and people, it was the first place where Mom and I had been a team, not us against the world. But us with the world.

Mom must have felt the same way, because she sighed. “Where does time go? Half the trip is over.”

“But we still have half to go,” I reminded her.

“True.”

“Where else would you want to go?”

That made her first bark with laughter, then hoot loudly, ending with a horsey snort. She was a symphony of animal noises. A few people turned to stare at her, but Mom didn’t mind. She wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes.

“What?” I demanded.

Mom snorted once more, pushed her luggage forward, bulging with a few more purchases from yesterday’s foray into the silk market. “It just seems so ridiculous to be planning our next trip while we’re still on this one.”

“True.” I shifted my messenger bag to my other side and grinned at her. “But it took us two years to work up the guts to visit Merc.”

“And he’s not even here.”

I sidled a glance at her and told her the truth: “You know what? I’m sort of glad.”

She paused, her mouth turning into an “O” of surprise, and then admitted without a trace of guilt, “Me, too.”

Thank goodness for the emergency cards I had made back at home, those business card–sized papers laminated with our hotel and flight information, Merc’s phone numbers, and the contact info for the U.S. embassies. Back in Beijing, I had asked the concierge to update mine and Mom’s with the hotel’s address outside of Hangzhou, which the Fremonts had booked for us. Our meager phrases — excuse me, hello, thank you — wouldn’t have gotten us far with the taxi driver in this city. (His English was even worse than our Chinese.) So at least I was able to hand him one of the cards.

Jacob’s orphanage was located in a village an hour’s drive from the city, and a harrowing hour’s drive it was. If there were traffic laws in China, our taxi driver didn’t obey them. He sped through red lights, made a U-turn straight into oncoming traffic, and blasted the horn at anything that moved slower than him. Which, as far as I could tell, included every truck, motorcycle, and car, except for other taxis. Not a second too soon, he dropped us off at the right hotel, looking proud of himself.

Mom was ashen. Sweat matted her bangs to her forehead, and she whispered, “I think I lost another five pounds.”

I threw open the door, glad for the fresh, fragrant air infused with tea. From what I had read about Hangzhou, the city and its surrounding towns and villages made up some of the primest tea-growing areas in China. But if we had passed any plantations on the way, they had slipped by in one big green blur.

Norah and Jacob were waiting outside the hotel, instead of inside the way they had said they would. Neither had noticed us yet from the bench. Jacob’s arm was thrown consolingly around his mother. She nodded in resignation, not agreement, to something he said.

Beside me, I heard Mom’s tiny, pitying “oh, no.”

Perhaps it was all the bargaining at Chinese markets where only the shy overpaid, but Mom didn’t insinuate her way into their conversation. She crashed it.

“Norah, what happened?” Mom barked as soon as she sidled out of the taxi, the drive immediately forgotten. Still, I noticed the big splotch of sweat on her back, had no doubt mine sported the identical belying mark of my nerves.

Her flat statement startled Jacob and Norah. They both stood. Where Norah smiled feebly, Jacob broke into a grin.

“Terra,” he said.

Norah brushed her hair out of her eyes and blurted, “That damned orphanage turned us away again. Second time in two days.”

“Mom, it’s just a screw-up,” said Jacob, resting a hand on her shoulder to calm her.

“I did everything right. I called the agency, I filled out the paperwork. They assured me we’d be able to visit,” Norah ranted. I had never seen her this angry, this out of control. “And of course, our caseworker back in Seattle has to be on spring break. They all are!”

“Mom, it’s really okay.”

Norah pulled herself together, literally straightened so she reached her full height, which was just shy of Jacob’s chin. I was always surprised at how petite Norah was; she carried herself tall. As though she had never made an emotional outburst, she peered at Mom and asked her solicitously now, “How was your trip?”

“Fine, fine,” said Mom, blasé as a seasoned traveler. “I want to hear about you inside.” She wheeled her suitcase through the hotel door. And this time it was Norah who followed, which left me outside with Jacob.

“How are you doing?” I asked him.

He shrugged, scuffed the toe of his Converse sneakers on the pavement, and then took my luggage.

“I can do that,” I said.

“Let me feel helpful.”

So I let go of the handle, knowing how immobilizing helplessness was. Instead, I simply held the hotel door open for him.

“The worst part,” said Jacob as he headed past the dining room filled with a few roughhewn tables and benches, and then lugged my suitcase up a flight of stairs, “is that Mom has been using this trip to distract herself from the whole divorce-remarriage mess.”

All along, Jacob had claimed that visiting the orphanage was his mom’s mission, not his. Still, I had to believe that when he was turned away at the orphanage, a patched-up part of his heart must have flaked off, exposing the abandoned boy he once was. I remembered the photos Norah had shared with us earlier, the ones of her collecting Jacob from China. The snapshot was unfocused, grainy, a younger Norah with frizzy hair wearing a blouse with enormous shoulder pads, holding a toddler-sized Jacob on her hip. What came through the most clearly was Jacob’s untreated cleft lip, and I could imagine him burying his head in Norah’s shoulder to hide his face the instant after the shutter clicked. As it was, trapped on film, Jacob faced the camera, unsmiling and wary as though he was used to being stared at, ridiculed.